Premiere :

When the onscreen birthing scene in question involves certified Very Funny Lady and relatively new mother Tina Fey, you can expect honesty — and hilarity. Case in point: Baby Mama's climactic childbirth scene finds Fey running down the hospital corridor alongside a gurney-bound, flailing Amy Poehler. 'This is like shitting a knife!'

Fey's Kate, for all her trendy compulsiveness, is surprisingly likable, never succumbing to the tired stereotype of the sterile yuppie who has sacrificed her sexuality and her soul for success. Poehler's role gets the bigger laughs: she's a gifted rubber-faced comedienne, particularly winning when, caught red-handed in one gaucherie after another—like sticking her gum under the coffee table—she outright denies what she's done.

Baby Mama...is blithely unconcerned with gender-baiting. In fact, the movie hardly allows itself any sharp moments at all — it's much too sweet-natured to be cruel, and much too cheerful to be angry. It probably could have pushed a few more buttons, but 'Baby Mama' aims to please and succeeds.

This movie, which reunites the "Saturday Night Live" news anchors Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, turns surrogate motherhood into an "Odd Couple" sitcom with conflicts of class that resolve into sisterhood. It's clumsy, not cute, an amateur show that's eager to amuse by any means — a stroller with airbags, a birthing counselor with an Elmer Fudd accent ("As your pwegnancy pwogwesses..."). Yet the show is redeemed by its co-stars, up to a pwoint.

Baby Mama is a politely bland retread of women's-movie clichés a generation old: the driven businesswoman who puts off motherhood till the last minute, then pursues it with type-A zeal; the guy who flees a first date when babies are mentioned; the down-to-earth potential boyfriend (Greg Kinnear) who, by his very existence, reminds the overly ambitious heroine of what really matters in life. Look, I have fond enough memories of Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard in Baby Boom, but that was more than 20 years ago. Have our ideas about working, parenting, and the formation of alternative families really changed so little since 1987?

The film never comes fully to term, as it were: the visual style is sitcom functional, and even the zippiest jokes fall flat because of poor timing. But, much like the prickly, talented Ms. Fey, it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean.

It's possible that Fey, like other television stars, is unused to being framed in full length, and, though in complete command of her delivery—dry, spiky, but unthreatening—she hasn't yet made up her mind how funny her body is meant to be. She isn't big enough to make a joke of her ripeness, like Bette Midler, but she's no Lily Tomlin, either. She could do worse than steal a trick from Lucille Ball—a lovely, elegant figure who taught herself to be graceless.

Uterine Chagrin [Premiere]
Baby Formula [Newsweek]
'Baby Mama' Is In Fertile Territory[Los Angeles Times]
Fey and Poehler Deliver Erratic 'Baby Mama' [WSJ]
Womb Service [Slate]
Baby Mama (2008) [NYT]
Switching Places [New Yorker]

Earlier: Tina Fey Keeps Perspective By Cleaning Up Baby Poop
Does The Female Buddy Movie Exist?
Tina Fey To Amy Poehler: I Wanna Put My Baby Inside You

In yesterday's Los Angeles Times, the awesome Carina Chocano laments the lack of decent female characters in recent comedies and searches for an answer to the issue. "The idea that a girl might play anything other than 'the girl' in a studio comedy is so far out of the mainstream that it's considered an experimental concept, not to mention a major financial risk," Chocano notes. And even more upsetting, she says: "'The girl' and 'the hot girl' have merged to produce a gorgeous, well-meaning, inoffensive love-object devoid of any motivating purpose and quite possibly manufactured in Stepford."

Chocano uses Jezebel obsession Lars and the Real Girl as a major example in her essay. She argues:

"culture has been gerrymandered, labeling as 'male' all movies that don't pander specifically to subjects only women are presumed to care about...The 'likability' of the male hero has become such an imperative in American comedies — even in small, woman-written ones such as 'Lars' — that a movie will sooner make a nice guy out of a dude in love with an anatomically correct Barbie than give us a girl's point of view.

All of which brings me back to Smiley Face. Admittedly it's not the best movie I've ever seen, but Anna Faris's baked-out-of-her-mind facial expressions are worth the price of admission alone. (Though perhaps Faris is not the best lady-in-comedy role model to begin with: she's made her name playing
ditsy blonds and is gearing up to play a a Playboy bunny and a a porn star, but I digress).

Anyway! Back to Smiley Face, which was independently financed, has yet to find a distributor and has only been shown at film festivals (and since the DVD appears to be available in January , it might never get released on the big screen). When I think about my favorite lady comedy moment of the past 15 years, it was in the uber indie Parker Posey movie Party Girl. If the major studios aren't going to finance female driven comedies, writers and directors should look elsewhere for the dough. Any studio comedy with a female protagonist would probably be about recipes and kittens anyway, though I have high hopes for the Amy Poehler/Rachel Dratch/Posey Warner Brothers movie, Spring Breakdown. What forthcoming lady comedies do you have high hopes for?

Film Comedies No Laughing Matter for Actresses [Los Angeles Times]